Ah, LEGO. I’m luckier than those of you with nieces and nephews in that I have a two year old son who is going to inherit all of my LEGO once he’s old enough to know not to eat it. Whilst my collection is not quite as prodigious as Mr. Reynolds’ it is still quite substantial and comprises bricks from every type (Duplo through to Technic). I love the way that the types od lego connect with each other quite well and some amazing constructions came out of this realisation when I was about 12.
All hail LEGO, Playmobil sucks!

Lego is clearly awesome. I remember my elder brother had this cool, huge Pirate ship, and I got a pretty big castle. My cousin (who is the same age as me and possibly even more of a geek; his words), also happened to have a castle and lots of fantasy pieces, so that worked out nicely. I always had the coolest “knight”-type guys, and he had the “Robin Hood/Archer”-type fellows. I think we had a story and everything, in that our groups were suspicious of eachother, but in the end came together to fight the evil overlord, or some such.

My brother once pushed me from the top bunk onto Lego. Owie. I still love the stuff, though. I liked the medieval range the best, followed by space. And I came up with the idea for Robin Hood Lego 10 years before it was released! If only I hadn’t been a small child, I could have been rich by now…

You were either a Playmobil kid or a Lego kid. Playmobil kids were the cool kids. Lego was small and stupid looking, while Playmobil had realism. You can’t build with Playmobil? We didn’t need silly plastics matching blocks to build up stuff, it’s much better to use proper wood-blocks for that and mix it with playmobil. I’ve build complete towns, huge castles and towers that reached the ceiling with my friends that way.

It was the opening presentation at a strange and eclectic conference in London in which a bunch of us presented our hobbies and interests in a series of short presentations to a warm and receptive audience. It was called Interesting 2008.